The American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt spent her professional life in Paris, where she was a member of the Impressionist group. "La Toilette" belongs to a group of ten color prints that Cassatt showed at her first independent exhibition (at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris) in 1891. The abstract, linear quality of the nude's back drew the attention of Cassatt's colleague and sometime collaborator, Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas (1834-1917), who exclaimed, "I do not admit that a woman can draw like that."